Is it just me, or are the Boston Red Sox running a little under the radar this season?
I can't really quantify that, but I strongly suspect I'm not the only one who's picking up that vibe. Now, let's be clear: This is the Red Sox, so of course they are getting attention. From the viewpoint of the club, the crucible of the Boston media likely seems just as intense as it always has been. It's the national buzz that I sense is lacking.
Compare the coverage of this year's Red Sox to that of last year's Dodgers and Astros, or the Cubs in 2016. That's what I'm getting at. Boston is a team that is 53 games over .500 and has a nonzero shot at setting a record for wins. (They'd have to go 20-1. Like I said, nonzero.) As a franchise, the Red Sox haven't won 100 or more games since 1946, the year of Ted Williams' only World Series, and their high-water mark is 105 W's, set two years before the Sox signed Babe Ruth. Yet they've been handled as just a run-of-the-mill pennant contender.
Right now, Boston is on pace to win 111 games. Their expected final total, based on run differential, is "only" 106 wins. Because of that and some other esoteric factors, such as roster value, the Red Sox actually rank behind the Astros in my power rating formula. Boston moved ahead of Houston during a three-week stretch in August, but the Astros are back in the slot they've generally held since spring training.
Let's assume I'm right about baseball's winningest regular-season team being a little short in the respect department. Is there a reason for it that we might not consciously sense? Just how good are these Red Sox?
With Houston in the top spot of my power rankings, the Astros own the best odds for winning the World Series at present, holding a 33 percent chance per my most recent run of simulations. Boston is second at 20 percent. That's not a bad place to be, but still, we're talking about the team that by good, old-fashioned W's has at least 10 more victories than every other team in baseball.
Some thoughts on why the Sox may be getting the short end of the attention stick:
1. They are overachieving, but it's not a feel-good story.
When the Mariners seemed destined for a playoff spot despite a negative run differential, it created a stir. When the A's went sprinting past them in the standings, it created a stir. People are excited about the Braves and the Rockies in the National League.
The Red Sox? They are overachieving external preseason forecasts, but it's not like those forecasts were dire. There looked to be little separation between them and the Yankees, though New York appeared to be a little stronger on paper. When we were referring to the superteams in baseball, the Red Sox might have been part of that conversation in some corners, though I tended to think of them as a half-tier down from that, probably the sixth- or seventh-best team.
They've proved to be a heck of a lot better than that, but these are still the Red Sox. They've won three of the last 14 championships, and their current payroll is easily the highest in the majors. Where's the feel-good story in that?
2. There are flaws in the roster -- or at least there were.
It feels like I've mentioned this about 600 times over the past couple of months, but the Red Sox rate poorly at multiple positions, at least in terms of bWAR. For the season, Boston ranks 28th at catcher, 29th at third base and last at second base. They are also in the bottom half at first base (16th) and shortstop (17th). That's a lot of holes for a team on pace to win 111 games.
That's also not the profile of the other power teams. Houston ranks 19th in left field but is in the top half everywhere else. The Dodgers are 22nd in the bullpen and 24th at second base, but are in the top 10 everywhere else. The Cubs are in the top half everywhere, and in the top 10 at all spots but the rotation, left field and center field. The Yankees are 26th at first base and 19th at third, but in the top 12 everywhere else. You get the picture: The Red Sox don't seem as complete as the other top contenders.
3. They've been lucky.
Here, I'm purposely conflating the word "luck" with "clutch." As mentioned, the Sox are on pace to outperform their run profile by 5.8 games. They've gone 36-17 in games decided by one or two runs. They also have been terrific situationally, ranking first in Fangraphs' clutch metric with their hitters and seventh with their pitchers. These factors tend to mean more when describing what has happened than what is going to happen.
4. A lack of splashy in-season acquisitions.
Boston has added to its roster during the season, but these have tended to be low-key acquisitions. Ian Kinsler was brought in to plug the hole at second base, and while his glove remains a big plus, the 36-year-old's bat seemed to have slowed by the time he arrived in Boston. However, after a slow start with the Red Sox, Kinsler has heated up with an .877 OPS over his last 13 games.
It's a similar story elsewhere. Steve Pearce didn't generate many headlines when he was traded from Toronto to Boston, but he has pounded the ball since moving, with a .940 OPS. Brandon Phillips? Yawn. There was a reason no one signed him, right? Well, Phillips crushed a ninth-inning go-ahead homer during Boston's epic comeback at Atlanta on Wednesday. Nathan Eovaldi? Who's that? Well, he's a big, right-handed starter who revs it up to the plate at triple digits and has a 107 ERA+ since coming over from the Rays during a time when Boston has battled key injuries to its rotation.
None of these moves set Twitter ablaze when they were made, but they've all paid huge dividends. Enough that by the time we reached the end of August, the last date for external acquisitions who would be postseason eligible, the Red Sox stood pat.
That deadline passed last week while Boston was in Chicago. During their series against the White Sox, power lefty Eduardo Rodriguez made his first start since suffering a badly sprained ankle in July. He was devastating, striking out 10 of the first 12 batters he faced and finishing with 12 whiffs overall. During his absence, Boston went 26-13.
"I know there's a lot of teams that made trades yesterday," Red Sox manager Alex Cora said. "Let's put it this way: His return was a trade for us. We'll take that one."
Boston might have had holes, but they've filled most of them in a low-key fashion that has paid off in high-key ways. If they were a bit lucky while getting off to the extreme start that they did, it was only a little lucky. Then they got better. Even though my roster ratings still leave the Red Sox behind the Astros, Yankees and Dodgers, they've improved their rating more than any of the other so-called superteams since the season began.
5. Individual successes have garnered more attention than the team's success.
This might be a reach, but it helps me make a point: While Boston needed to shore up some areas for much of the season, in the areas they've been good, they've been off the charts.
Those bWAR ratings I was just nit-picking about? I left out the areas where Boston is good. The Red Sox rank first in left field and right field, third in the rotation, second in the bullpen and fifth in center field.
Mookie Betts sits atop my Award Index as the AL MVP front-runner and is the guy I see as 2018's top overall performer. J.D. Martinez ranks eighth and is making a run at a Triple Crown. Chris Sale is my Cy Young favorite and ranks as the 13th-best player in baseball this season. Andrew Benintendi and Xander Bogaerts both rank in the top 35. David Price and Craig Kimbrel are in the top 100.
The Index rates players against average performance, so anyone who rates in the positive has been an above-average player this season. Boston has 22 such players, with 53.7 percent of their current contributors rating better than average. Only Houston and Philadelphia have featured more roster depth.
(Side note for context: Of the players remaining in the Orioles' organization after all that team's trades, just four of the 45 players who have logged big league time this season have performed better than average.)
The bottom line is that for a good chunk of the season, Boston's actual level of talent didn't quite match up with what was a historical rate of winning games. It also appeared to be buoyed by career performances by the likes of Betts and Martinez that could have been expected to level off, at least to some extent. But those stars haven't cooled off at all, and the Boston roster has fewer holes than it did while it was building all of this momentum.
How good are these Red Sox? Really good, and better than they were when the season began. They might be just one of the superteams, but they are indeed super and they've won more games than any of the others.
What the numbers say
What Ohtani's injury means for Pujols
With Shohei Ohtani likely headed for Tommy John surgery, there's a lot of debate going around about whether allowing him to continue as a two-way player is the best course of action, either for him or the Angels. David Schoenfield has that pretty much covered in this piece.
Schoenfield mentions the Albert Pujols dilemma, but I want to burrow into that a little further. Let's assume that Ohtani does have the surgery and is cleared to play as a DH during the entirety of the 2019 season, or at least most of it. Obviously, the recovery time from the procedure is much quicker for a hitter than a pitcher, so perhaps that's semi-realistic. Just to cite one case, Yankees rookie Gleyber Torres had the surgery on June 21, 2017, was back in time to play 13 games during spring training this year and is now a strong Rookie of the Year candidate. As a middle infielder, Torres has to be able to throw, a factor that isn't in play for Ohtani if he remains strictly a DH.
Assuming Ohtani won't play the field, DH is the only option. That also happens to be the best position for Pujols, who turns 39 in January and recently underwent season-ending surgery on his left knee. Pujols is an all-time great, but in more than 1,000 plate appearances over the past two seasons, he has hit .243/.287/.397 with a bottom-line value below replacement.
Pujols has ranked last in all of baseball in sprint speed in each of the past two seasons, according to Statcast, and that was before the knee surgery. His athleticism is gone. He graded out as roughly average with the glove this year but has played just 76 games there over the past two years. Now, consider these splits that cover Pujols' last two seasons, from baseball-reference.com:
OPS as 1B: .632 (76 games)
OPS as DH: .705 (189 games)
OPS vs. LHP: .637 (275 plate appearances)
OPS vs. RHP: .699 (859 plate appearances)
The average AL first baseman has a .737 OPS this season, and the average DH is at .782. Last season, those numbers were .805 for first basemen and .735 for DHs. There is not a role in which the Angels can expect a 39-year-old Pujols to match league-average production.
Ohtani has not hit lefties well this year. He's at .194/.289/.299 against southpaws with only one of his 18 homers coming against them. That homer came Tuesday, off Texas' Mike Minor, and it was the culmination of some improved results for the phenom against lefties. It's a tiny sample, but he is 4-for-14 against lefties since the beginning of August with a .912 OPS.
The point here is that with a hitter as talented as Ohtani, you don't want to consign him to a platoon role. Sure, you might sit him against tougher lefties from time to time, but chances are those platoon splits will level off as he gains experience. And while it might be harsh to point this out, the fact of the matter is that Ohtani's overall .588 OPS against lefties is only marginally worse than what the right-handed Pujols has done for two years running.
Angels GM Billy Eppler says that the plan is to put a contending team on the field next year. That team possibly will be the first Angels team not managed by Mike Scioscia since 1999. If the Angels indeed have a new skipper, that person might not have a history with Pujols and will have much more motivation to prove himself than the long-tenured Scioscia.
The proverbial elephant in the room is Pujols' contract, which will pay him $28 million next season, $29 million in 2020 and $30 million in 2021. I don't know what, if any, role Angels owner Arte Moreno has played in how Pujols has been deployed, and without hearing otherwise, I'd assume it's none. However, Moreno entered into his partnership with Pujols with the long view in mind.
After his current massive pact expires, Pujols will begin a 10-year, $10 million personal services contract with the team. He has to pay Pujols that money whether or not he plays, and this doesn't seem like the kind of relationship that would be terminated by the player being released, leaving the club to eat a mountain of cash if it just lets him go. The Angels have a lot of incentive to stay in the good graces of Pujols, who will be a face of the franchise for years to come. Does this play into how, or if, he is used? I don't know, but I hope it would not.
ESPN's Alden Gonzalez suggested one way to limit Pujols' time at first base next season would be to teach Ohtani how to play the position. It's worth considering, though Eppler quickly shot down the notion.
What I keep coming back to is this: If the Angels are serious about winning and they need to accommodate somebody, it should be Ohtani, not Pujols. It hurts me to even write the words because I have so much respect for Pujols and a general childlike reverence for the game's all-time greats, of which Pujols is clearly one. But how long can the Angels keep putting Pujols on the field every day when doing so is undermining their attempts at contention?
Complicating all of this is the two years remaining on Mike Trout's current contract. Eppler dismissed the idea of trading Trout, for good reason. The upside from even a small chance that you can keep him beyond his current deal, not to mention the 20 or so WAR he'll give over the next two years, is worth more than anything the Angels could bring back in a trade. If he leaves and the Angels are left with a compensatory draft pick, so be it.
Nevertheless, the rails of those eventual Trout negotiations would be smoothed by a couple of seasons of bona fide contention. Trout will get his money no matter what, but if he finishes his contract and still has but one career postseason hit (a homer, of course), that seems as likely to turn his head as any quest for fame and fortune. But if the Angels win, and that window looks like it'll stay open, then L.A. can only help its case.
All of these factors were present even before news of Ohtani's probable surgery. Now that the Angels could be looking at the prospect of having him as an everyday DH, things get much more complicated. For a player as great as Pujols, you'd want the Angels to do right by him. At the same time, they owe it to Trout, their fans and themselves to do what is right by the team. I'm not sure, given Pujols' late-career level of play, that those two objectives can be reconciled.
Since you asked
The service-time issue
The issue of service-time manipulation has once again reared its ugly head with another round of high-profile decisions by clubs to leave seemingly big-league-ready players in the minors. That determination of readiness is subjective, and you always have to acknowledge the possibility that my assessment of a prospect (or yours) might not match up with that of a team's key decision-makers. Nevertheless, this is one rodeo we've been to time and again.
The rhetoric around these most recent decisions was all too familiar:
On Eloy Jimenez: "At this point, we don't feel it makes sense for [Eloy], at age 21, to make an appearance at a third level this season. From a player-development standpoint, we view him as continuing to improve. He has had a very good season offensively," White Sox general manager Rick Hahn said.
On Vladimir Guerrero Jr.: "We feel like there is a good opportunity in the minor leagues for Vlad to become a better, more well-rounded player than in the majors leagues," Blue Jays GM Ross Atkins said earlier this season.
Last week, during a radio interview in Toronto, he said that, indeed, Guerrero will not be recalled during September roster expansion, and team president Mark Shapiro said Wednesday the decision "has nothing to do with business."
Then there is the case of Minnesota's Byron Buxton, who looked like a budding star entering the season before injuries set him back, injuries that Buxton later said he tried to play through while struggling early in the campaign.
"We are singularly focused on putting together a plan with our strength and conditioning, medical staff, hitting staff to put Byron in the best position to enter spring training 2019 ready to compete, seize the starting center field job and be the force we all believe he can be, which he knows he can be for the Minnesota Twins, for years to come," Twins GM Thad Levine said.
Buxton finished the season playing for Triple-A Rochester. His minor league numbers this season weren't too good, but he did hit .365/.400/.596 in August, which at least suggests he was turning things around. He won't get a chance to build on that uptick in the majors, where the Twins have a lot of games remaining against weak AL Central pitching staffs, nor in the minors, because that season is over.
In making these decisions, each of these teams is buying another year of cost control for the players in question, a fact particularly difficult for Buxton to swallow because he had already established himself as one of the best defenders in the major leagues.
To be clear: I don't blame any of these executives for their decisions. You have to do what is in the best interests of the club, balancing short-term and long-term objectives under a system that is in place and was created through the process of collective bargaining. None of the Twins, White Sox or Blue Jays are in contention, but if any of them were, chances are these young players would have been in the majors for a while now. I also don't blame the execs for their boilerplate-type comments. What are they supposed to say? At least they said something.
This has become standard practice in major league baseball under the current system of accruing service time, moving toward arbitration eligibility and eventually reaching free agency. Earlier this season, we saw it with Ronald Acuna Jr. in Atlanta. We saw it in years past with the likes of Chicago's Kris Bryant and Philadelphia's Maikel Franco, who both ended up filing grievances that remain unresolved.
If you're interested in the legalities of this practice, I point you to this breakdown by Sheryl Ring at Fangraphs of a Boston College Law Review paper related to the issue. Some food for thought. That aside, it's clear that there is a structural problem at play, one that incentivizes teams away from always putting their best team on the field at the big league level. That's not fair to the players, nor is it particularly fair to fans -- though many of the latter support their teams' decisions to grab that extra year. Still, for fans of the White Sox and Blue Jays, getting to see Jimenez and Guerrero would be a much better reason to turn up at the ballpark than anything those teams have to offer during the weeks to come.
There are a number of possible solutions to this dilemma, such as changing the number of days needed to be credited with a year of service time. I've also seen the idea floated of simply starting the clock on a player's eventual eligibility for free agency from the date he signs his first professional contract. Of course, any change to the current system would be a matter of bargaining between the players and owners, and the current CBA runs through the 2021 season.
However, this could end up being the hot button issue by the time negotiations for the next CBA begin. After last winter's shockingly slow free-agent market, we might be entering a time when teams simply don't want to step up for a player who, after surviving six years of team control, might already be in the midst of, or even past, his career peak.
The idea has always been that while good players were undervalued early in their careers, they would make up for it via free agency. But if that paradigm has truly shifted for all but the most bankable of stars, then the MLBPA is going to be clamoring for a change that gets players into free agency faster. So while the debate about service time right now is centered around the beginning of the clock, the players might be increasingly concerned with the end of it.
Either way, this is an issue that isn't going away anytime soon.
Coming right up
These matchups are why we watch
Junk stat time! I've written about this before, but I have a metric in the schedule tab of MLBPET -- my projection and tracking system -- that rates the "quality" of each matchup. It doesn't mean anything, really. I just like to be able to quickly create a hierarchy of games as I follow the action.
Well, this weekend's series between the Astros and Red Sox at Fenway Park features the three highest-rated games of the season. I made this claim earlier this year of an Astros-at-Yankees series, but now that Boston has flown past New York in my power rankings, this becomes the "it" series. Sunday night's game is on ESPN, with Houston's Dallas Keuchel scheduled to face Boston's Rick Porcello.
Over in the National League, this week will feature a few head-to-head series with some heavy-duty impact on the packed postseason races. Over the weekend, the Dodgers will visit the Rockies. They'll do so without closer Kenley Jansen, which will put the beleaguered L.A. bullpen to the test.
The other big weekend series in the National League began Thursday in Phoenix, with the Braves taking on the Diamondbacks. Both teams are suddenly staggering, so they will try to renew their respective postseason pushes. Once that's done, Arizona will head north to play the Rockies in a key four-game set at Coors Field.
Remember that excellent Brewers-Cubs series earlier this week? They're doing it again next week, with Milwaukee visiting Wrigley Field. Finally, next Thursday the Dodgers will begin a huge four-game series in St. Louis.
These are the games we've been waiting for all season. Enjoy.